Fun and games and games

We’ve been super busy lately, well, at least I have. The other 4400 people who have the ability to author on the site have apparently been abducted by aliens and, one can only hope, will some day be returned to us with (and I’m just throwing this out here) some really cool powers.

IN THE MEANTIME…

The Quitter addressed her fellow travelers at CPAC. She’s clearly still mad about being asked questions and stuff in 2008. She also hates Obama because he keeps apologizing for America which is code for ‘I’m angry that black man is in the White House and now I’m going to make up some reasons why so I won’t sound racist’. Yep, that’s right… even now, almost four years after her brutal loss, she’s still managed to learn NOTHING. As for the rest of CPAC, the weekend revolved around trying desperately to ignore the fact that when Bush left office the country was losing more than 600k jobs per month and, after three years of Obama, we’re now gaining more than 200k jobs per month.

Council is looking more and more deeply into the Austin Energy rate increase. There’s a Morrison-Tovo-Martinez plan that was discussed last week in the Chron. I’m still waiting for some firmer numbers, but I’m highly skeptical of the business case for such a massive and abrupt rate increase. I’m also skeptical about the business acumen of the both the GM at Austin Energy and the members of the Electric Utility Commission who are seeking this plan to continue the pay-go approach to funding expansion. The mindless focus on the exclusion of debt as a means of financing new generation capacity is really, really curious.

I’d call them stupid but I don’t know any of them that well. So, I’ll just be left to wonder why they’d ignore the cheapest source of capital available to them. It’s also kind of dumb to try to rebuild your reserves all at once. That can be done over time.

What we do not have and desperately need are some accurate numbers. I’ve heard that the $2mn per week loss number being thrown around by the GM is bullshit. I’ve also heard it’s a little more. I’ve heard it’s almost entirely reserve reconstruction and capacity expansion NOT a true loss on continuing operations. So, I’m going to hold off on publishing anything more since I want to make sure we nail it the first time out.

Apparently, some folks in East Texas are upset that a private company, the one that wants to build the KeystoneXL pipeline, is using eminent domain to place an easement on their land. It’s a shame all these folks were so busy in 2010 ‘stopping Obama’ that they forgot to throw out the people who created all this garbage and allowed a private company to have access to ED. Instead, they just helped elect more of them.

Personally, I don’t care any more if KXL is built. However, it pisses me off when people talk about all this great Canadian oil. First, it’s not oil in this pipeline, it’s bitumen. More commonly, we call it asphalt. THAT’S what we’re bringing to Texas and this is what SE Texas will look like after a few years of this wonderful new energy source being piped down here.